Borderlands (2009)

Review for the Nintendo Switch release.

Oh Borderlands, how captivating you can be in the beginning. You are so charming and unique, anyone can fall in love with you. But over time, you start showing your cracks, and reveal how shallow and broken you really are.

Well, that was kind of rough, sorry! But that this exactly how I feel with this game. I loved it so much for the first hours, then my interest started to dwindle. Got to the ending, was disappointed, then played the DLC's and was even more disappointed. Sigh...

The story is quite simple: you are vault hunter in a planet called Pandora. This vault is legendary and apparently it opens only once in a lot of years (forgot how many). If found and opened, you'll find treasures! Yay! That's it, you go around this planet, completing quests for some of it's inhabitants, killing bandits that get in your way (or who bothering the citizens), killing wildlife, etc. You even get in trouble with the planet's government at some point. Simple enough, right? All of this story is told through some comedy commentary and written descriptions, which is nice, but there could have been more of that. There are almost no cutscenes in this game, which is a shame. Although, they added more cutscenes and story telling in the DLC's.

The graphics of this game are one of the characteristics that makes it Borderlands. Cartoonish looking, almost comic like. I really like it. This even helps the game to age well. In the sound department, the voice acting is pretty decent. I played as Mordecai and I enjoyed the performance of the voice actor. Also, the NPC's have very distinct voices and I appreciate that. The game sound is ok and the music is relatively simple.

Gameplay wise, the game does loose my interest pretty soon. It's a looter shooter, and I don't care for loot. that is a problem. Loot for me means item management to the extreme. I hate having to compare weapons every time I find something (which is all the time), and then decide what I am keeping, because I can't hold all of it. It's annoying. I know some people enjoy doing this. I don't. I just want to move and kill some more stuff. The missions/ quests are mostly the same: go and clear this bandit camp, clear this group of Skags, clear this another bandit camp. And sometimes there is a boss fight. Sometimes. That's it.

I played the game on the Switch, and the DLC's don't work. One of the DLC's is bugged and I couldn't finish it. The other DLC's i finished, but it was a hassle. There is only one place where you can respawn after you close the game. Only one place! Sometimes you have to walk for an eternity in order to get where you left off. That is unacceptable. I did enjoy the zombies DLC, but this respawn thing was so bad, that I couldn't turn off my Switch. I left it on idle (is that what it's called?) so that I could continue where I left off when I wanted to start playing again.

I started liking this game so much that I initially gave it 5 stars, but after over 30 hours playing it (probably a lot more than that), and an unplayable DLC, it's a 2 stars for me. Sorry... Anyways, I will keep playing the series. I heard that Borderlands 2 is good. Let's see if that opinion stays true!

Wow, I'm enjoying this way more than I should. This is weird. How come I never played these games before? Didn't even pay attention to their existence! I mean, I knew about it and how funny it looked like a cartoon, but wasn't interested at all.

I'm a bit sad that I got some biiiiig spoilers playing assault on dragon keep before anything else, but on the other hand, I am glad I did. Thanks to that, I found another universe to explore.

I am playing as Mordecai, because I have a deadly pet 🐦

Borderlands.. another game that I originally played when it was released many years ago and decided to re-visit in a new rendition years on. I came by the game this time in search of some mindless fun, and it does indeed provide that.

I believe Borderlands is one of the original looter-shooter games of the modern era (feel free to fact check that). You pick one of four characters and go out and start killing stuff, with the gameplay loop being kill bigger things, get stronger guns, kill bigger things, get stronger guns, rinse and repeat. I played it solo, but you can also opt to play with three of your best friends for maximum carnage.

The story is very loose. I got to the point that I was picking up quests and didn't even bother to read the dialogue on the side quests because none of it matters. The entire game is based on fetch quests; load up on a list and go shopping. After about 12 hours of this, I threw in the towel because I was bored and tired of aimless run and gun fetching. The same enemies, the same scenery, the same guns, just a few upgrades as they slowly trickle in. The gameplay loop isn't bad, it just gets boring really fast. However, it was the right game for me at the time because I wanted something mindless that I could pick away at to bridge a gap between heavy, story driven, open world, or technical games that I needed a break from. There isn't a lot of substance here, just grab a weapon and kill stuff. I don't know if I will ever come back to finish it, but it served a purpose.

One thing to add, I hear lots about the humor in Borderlands. This game is not funny. I'm not what is supposed to be funny about the lame ass, edgy dark humor, that falls flat and is repeated a million times over and over and over. Not that Borderlands needs to have story to succeed, but (hot take) the story of capitalist mega corp. owns every portion of peoples lives and hur dur guns come from vending machines and your dystopian capitalist nightmare has come true aesthetic and trope is literally the most boring ass way to weave a plot ever created. Looking at you The Outer Worlds...

The Borderlands movie was a shitshow. An humorless slop with a script so bad that not even Lydia Tár could save it (she was too busy dealing with her awful wig so she couldn't even act).

I wrote an article in spanish with my impressions. Here it is in case you wanna read it.

Borderlands is not the best video games franchise, far from it, but it deserved better.

You finish playing Divinity: Original Sin II and think, "I need something fast paced and mindless after that," and Borderlands is on sale for ten bucks, and you realize you've never actually played the first one all the way through, so you get it, and right from the start you're like, yes, this is perfect. There's constant movement, constant action, a new gun around every corner, leveling up every 5 minutes, absurdly short load times, no difficult dialogue trees to navigate, man, this is exactly what you needed.

And then you're riding high into the final battle with 3 Eridian weapons and a super short cooldown on your Phasewalk which also heals you, and you just can't lose. And you don't lose. And then you hit a wall harder than Wile E. Coyote in a rocket-powered ATV.

It's over. I mean, sure, there's the DLC, but one of them is zombies and another one's just an arena and another one's all about the vehicles which are probably the most frustrating part of the game, and you've already got all the best guns and aren't really interested in the rest of your skill tree (besides which you're kind of overleveled at this point)—so that's it.

As you feel the depression setting in, and I'm talking real, chemical withdrawal depression, you desperately start a NG+ of Horizon Zero Dawn, thinking, "This is totally different, this is exactly what I need," but the beautiful terrains and great acting turn to ash in your mouth I mean eyes and ears. And now it's time to go to work, which is hard enough as it is these days, and not gonna lie, you almost burst into tears a couple times.

But then you hang out with your friends that night and watch Get Smart, and the next day you start Vampyr which so far is a surprisingly good game, and now everything is fine...other than the fascist takeover, the pandemic, the climate crisis, etc., etc. I MEAN VIDEO GAMES, wuuuuuut?